In 1858 Erastus Beadle, a native of Cooper's country near Lake Otsego who had
become a successful publisher in Buffalo, moved to New York in order to launch
an ambitious project of cheap publishing for a mass audience. When a number of
his song books and handbooks priced at ten cents made an immediate hit, he was
encouraged to begin a weekly series of orange-backed "Dime Novels." The first of
these appeared in June, 1860. It was followed by more than three hundred tales
in the original series, and in due course by thousands of similar titles in more
than thirty distinct series issued over a period of forty-five years.

The Beadle stories -- they were hardly novels, for they seldom ran to more
than thirty thousand words -- were patterned after the thrillers that Gleason
and Ballou had been publishing in Boston since the 1840's, although there was
probably a greater emphasis on Western adventure. What Beadle contributed was
persistence, a more systematic devotion to the basic principles of big business,
and the perception that Boston was yielding first place as a publishing center
to New York.1 Beadle's editor was Orville J. Victor, a former
newspaperman from Sandusky, Ohio, who supervised the production of dime novels
and other series for thirty years. The distribution of the tales was handled at
first through jobbers, but after 1864 by the American News Company, which was
closely affiliated with the firm of Beadle & Adams.2 The usual
print order for a dime novel was sixty thousand, but

91 THE WESTERN HERO

many titles were reprinted again and again. Edward S. Ellis's Seth Jones,
which appeared as No. 8 of the original series, eventually sold more than four
hundred thousand copies. Beadle's total sales between 1860 and 1865 approached
five millions.3 These figures are not sensational by modern
standards
but they mark a revolution in nineteenth-century American publishing. An
audience for fiction had been discovered that had not previously been known to
exist. Beadle has some claim to rank among the industrial giants of his day. In
his field, as an organizer and promoter of a basic discovery made by his
predecessors, he was a figure comparable to Rockefeller or Carnegie.

Large-scale production implies regularity of output. The customer must be
able to recognize the manufacturer's product by its uniform packaging -- hence
the various series with their characteristic formats. But a standard label is
not enough; the product itself must be uniform and dependable. Victor's
contribution to Beadle's success was the perfection of formulas which could be
used by any number of writers, and the inspired alteration of these formulas
according to the changing demands of the market. Victor was what would now be
called a born "mass" editor; that is, he had an almost seismographic intuition
of the
nature, degree, and direction of changes in popular tastes.4

Writers on Victor's staff composed at great speed and in unbelievable
quantity; many of them could turn out a thousand words an hour for twelve hours
at a stretch. Prentiss Ingraham, son of the author of The Prince of the House
of David, produced more than six hundred novels, besides plays and short
stories.5 He is said to have written a thirty-five-thousand-word
tale
on one occasion in a day and a night.6 Fiction produced in these
circumstances virtually takes on the character of automatic writing. The
unabashed and systematic use of formulas strips from the writing every vestige
of the interest usually sought in works of the imagination; it is entirely
subliterary. On the other hand, such work tends to become an objectified mass
dream, like the moving pictures, the soap operas, or the comic books that are
the present-day equivalents of the Beadle stories. The individual writer
abandons his own personality and identifies himself with the reveries of his
readers. It is the presumably close fidelity of the Beadle

92 THE WESTERN HERO

stories to the dream life of a vast inarticulate public that renders them
valuable to the social historian and the historian of ideas.

Eventually, however, the industrial revolution in publishing leads to more
and more frenzied competition among producers and destroys even this value in
the dime novel. Orville Victor said that when rival publishers entered the field
the Beadle writers merely had to kill a few more Indians.7 But it
went
farther than that. The outworn formulas had to be given zest by a constant
search after novel sensations. Circus tricks of horsemanship, incredible feats
of shooting, more and more elaborate costumes, masks, and passwords were
introduced, and even such ludicrous ornaments as worshippers of a Sun God
devoted to human sacrifice in a vast underground cavern in the region of
Yellowstone Park.8 Killing a few more Indians meant, in practice,
exaggerating violence and bloodshed for their own sakes, to the point of an
overt sadism. By the 1890's the Western dime novel had come to hinge almost
entirely upon conflicts between detectives and bands of robbers that had little
to do with the ostensibly Western locales.

The thirty-year development preceding this final period of stasis reveals
the working out of internal necessities already perceptible long before in the
work of Cooper. The derivation of the Beadle Westerns from the Leatherstocking
series, evident enough on the basis of internal evidence, is certified by
Orville Victor's explicit testimony. In 1884 he told a reporter for the
Boston Evening Transcript that the Beadle stories "followed right after
`Cooper's Tales,' which suggested them."9 What does this mean in
terms
of themes, characters, and plots?

The strongest link connecting the Beadle Westerns with Cooper is the
representation of a benevolent hunter without a fixed place of abode, advanced
in age, celibate, and of unequalled prowess in trailing, marksmanship, and
Indian
fighting. That this group of characteristics, within certain limits of
variation, had come to exist as a persona, a mask, is already evident in
Paulding's Kentucky hunter Bushfield in Westward Ho! (1832). The
nineteenth-century fondness for disguises on the stage and in fiction, a taste
which encouraged actors to exploit mimicry and make-up as a form of
sensationalism, would immediately suggest using the

93 THE WESTERN HERO

Leatherstocking persona as a disguise. This is done in the most famous of
all Beadle Westerns, Edward S. Ellis's Seth Jones; or, The Captives of the
Frontier, which Orville Victor called "the perfect Dime Novel."10 Not until
the
end of the tale does the reader learn that the aged and eccentric hunter who has
dominated the action is the gently bred young Eugene Morton in disguise. The
pretext for Morton's odd persistence in concealing his identity is so flimsy (he
had heard that his sweetheart had ceased to care for him while he was away
fighting in the Revolution) that one feels Ellis must be employing the
persona for its own sake. It is the hero's assumed role that gives the
title to the book, is illustrated on the cover, and engrosses the author's
attention. The reader who has followed the earlier analysis of Cooper's
procedures will recognize the device as a neat maneuver for combining the
picturesque appeal of the "low" hunter with the official status of the
"straight" upper-class hero.

Ellis long continued to be a prolific contributor to the various Beadle
series, and his handling of traditional formulas and stereotypes retained its
appeal for decades. As late as 1877, for example, the firm reprinted for the
third time a tale by Ellis (Kent, the Ranger; or, The Fugitives of the
Border,11 first published in 1860) which is almost pure Cooper.
The
action takes place in southern Ohio in the early nineteenth century. The
heroine, Rosalind, daughter of Sir William Leland, is captured by the Indians;
the pursuit is undertaken by Rosalind's brother George and her lover Roland
Leslie, the traditional straight hero, with the indispensable aid of the
wandering hunter and ranger Kent Whiteman, who has the requisite dialect and
other traits of the Leatherstocking type.12 After Rosalind is rescued and united
in marriage to Leslie, the old hunter is often a welcome guest in their
household.13

The number of such more or less exact replicas of Leatherstocking is quite
large. Mrs. Ann S. Stephens, for example, the majestic woman of letters who
wrote Malaeska, the first of the Beadle Dime Novels, in 1862 turned her
gaze from the classic ground of the Hudson Valley to write Esther: A Story of
the Oregon Trail.14 This story introduces a "Nature's
Nobleman,"
Kirk Waltermyer, who combines the characteristics of Leatherstocking

94 THE WESTERN HERO

with the historic mission that had been ascribed to Daniel Boone.
Mrs. Stephens is fully conscious that the persona exists, both for her and for
her readers. Waltermyer, she says, strong dialect, deerskin costume, and all,
was "the very beau ideal of that pioneer race who, scorning the ease and
fashionable fetters of city life, have laid the foundation of new States in the
unexplored regions of the giant West, and dashed onward in search of new fields
of enterprise, leaving the great results to be gathered by the settlers that
came slowly after him."15

Since Mrs. Stephens's Waltermyer owes something to Boone of Kentucky, while
Seth Jones hails from Vermont, we are forced to recognize two distinct although
not inharmonious strains of influence which impinge upon Leatherstocking's
upstate New York tradition. The new forces correspond to the two great cycles of
frontier humor in the first half of the nineteenth century, the Down East
tradition and the Southwestern tradition. Either could be merged with the
Leatherstocking persona to repair that neglect of comic possibilities which is
so marked in Cooper. Seth Jones has much of the comic stage Yankee, including
the cracked voice. Waltermyer can hardly be comic in the unbuttoned Davy
Crockett manner as long as he rides the high horse of the noble savage's
rhetorical dignity, but there are other Beadle Leatherstockings who do embody
traces of the Southwestern half-horse, half-alligator mode of humor. We are told
that Ellis's Oregon Sol in Nathan Todd; or, The Fate of the Sioux'
Captive, who originated in Boonslick County, Missouri, a year before Kit
Carson's birth in the same neighborhood, is "whimsical and eccentric,"16 but Ellis was not at home in the Crockett tradition and does not
give
any samples of humorous dialogue. Other writers are better able to equip their
aged hunters with suitable tall tales Joseph E. Badger, Jr.'s old scout Pete
Shafer, in The Forest Princess, or, The Kickapoo Captives. A Romance of the
Illinois, is rather elaborately developed in this manner.17 But
Badger's comic triumph -- and it is not a negligible one -- is Mustang Sam, of
the Far Southwest, who despite a fantastic velvet-and-silk costume that belongs
to the theater or the recesses of adolescent longing rather than to any actual
West, delivers himself of a noble frontier boast beginning, "I'm Mustang Sam,
the high muck-a-muck of E Pluribus

95 THE WESTERN HERO

Unum. I was got by a bull whale out o' a iceberg."18 This
is not the definitive achievement of Mark Twain's "I was sired by the Great
American Eagle and foaled by a Continental dam,"19 but it is worthy to stand
just below the master's perfection.

Unfortunately, the tradition of backwoods humor was not always handled with
so much feeling for its true nature. Edward L. Wheeler, whom we shall encounter
presently as the celebrated creator of Deadwood Dick, used it a great deal, but
he exaggerated the eccentric aspect of Southwestern exuberance to the point of
imbecility. Wheeler's character Old Avalanche, unwarrantably described as "a
genuine northern mountain man," who makes his first appearance turning
handsprings and accompanied by a pet black goat named Florence Nightingale,20 is allowed to talk
endlessly in a dialect that Wheeler intended to be outrageously funny, but it
is now unreadable even under the urging of scientific curiosity. This character
appears repeatedly in the Deadwood Dick series and does not improve on longer
acquaintance.21 But Wheeler's most audacious use of the Crockett
tradition is his creation of a frontier boast for an alarming young woman named
Rowdy Kate, who announces, "I'm a reg'ler old double-distilled typhoon, you
bet," and so on.22

Either in the rather solemn traditional form preferred by Ellis, or with a
comic elaboration of dialect, the persona of Leatherstocking was
endlessly repeated in the Beadle stories. Of seventy-nine dime novels selected
as a sample of those dealing with the West between 1860 and 1893, forty contain
one or more hunters or trappers whose age, costume, weapons, and general
functions entitle them to be considered lineal descendants of the great
original. Such characters cling to the flintlock rifle long after their
companions are using breech-loading Winchesters and six-shooters; and they take
reluctantly to horseback, although they are in the end forced to this innovation
as they are to repeating weapons. By preference they pursue their specialty of
rescuing beautiful heroines from the Indians. When the Indians begin to yield
place in the dime novel to road agents or counterfeiters as the standard enemy,
the hunters of the Leatherstocking type lend a hand in fighting the newer foes.
Generally speaking, however, the traditional hunter and trapper is so closely
linked in

96 THE WESTERN HERO

imagination with the redskins, living with them in a kind of symbiosis, that he
follows the Indian off the stage at a certain chronological distance. It should
be added that Leatherstocking's notorious virtue was a hereditary trait. A
hunter wearing moccasins and carrying a long rifle is almost certain -- although
not absolutely certain, since nothing is impossible for a Beadle author -- to
be benign.

In contrast with the relative stability of the persona of the aged
scout, the younger hunter produced by doubling the character of Leatherstocking
was less predictable. Under the name of Kit Carson he had already proved himself
capable of dominating the action of Averill's early tales, and he, rather than
the original Leatherstocking, was the ancestor of later Wild Western heroes like
Deadwood Dick and Buffalo Bill -- the literary Buffalo Bill, that is. If we are
to make out a continuity of development in the Wild Western hero from
Leatherstocking to the two-gun man of the 1890's, we shall have to establish the
nature of this transformation with some care.

Young, handsome, and actually or potentially genteel trappers and hunters
are almost as numerous as the older hunters descended directly from
Leatherstocking. We may note some of them in Ellis's works. The titular hero of
Nathan Todd, or, The Fate of the Sioux' Captive,23 for
example,
is of this younger group. The Leatherstocking types are Oregon Sol, already
mentioned, and Bill Biddon, both natives of Boonslick County, Missouri. Todd
originated in Maine and has some coloring of the Down East tradition that Ellis
had exploited in Seth Jones. Although he sometimes speaks a dialect that ought
to consign him irretrievably to a nonheroic status, he has become a trapper
because of a disappointment in love, he carries with him a locket that
experienced readers will recognize as an incontrovertible badge of upper-class
standing, and in the presence of the heroine he speaks in the elevated rhetoric
appropriate for a hero of romance.24 Further evidence is furnished
by
Todd's eloquent discourse to Biddon on religion and immortality. The relation of
the characters to one another is placed quite beyond doubt when Biddon
sacrifices himself so that Todd and Irene Merment may be saved and eventually
wed.25

97 THE WESTERN HERO

Lewis Dernor in Ellis's The Riflemen of the Miami appears as a
hunter in the company of no less than three woodsmen developed from the
Leatherstocking persona. His right to mate with Edith Sudbury after her rescue
from the Indians is authenticated by the pangs of sensibility he experiences when
he clasps the heroine's almost fairy hand. The touch of this delicate member on
the horny palm of the hunter is a moment charged with meaning in the development
of the Western hero.26 It shows Ellis confronting the possibility that an
upper-class heroine might love a man of the Wild West, as Cooper could never
quite bring himself to do. In Ellis's The Hunter's Cabin. An Episode of the
Early Settlements, George Ferrington, "a young hunter, or, more properly, a
soldier,"27 is mated with Annie Stanton without perceptible tenseness over
status; perhaps because in this tale Annie's father Sylvester Stanton seems to
fill the place normally occupied by the Leatherstocking persona. He is
represented as a former associate of Daniel Boone28 and likewise has some of
the
traits of the Indian hater who had been a recognizable figure since the time of
James McHenry's The Spectre of the Forest (1823). Ferrington uses a
conventional rhetoric but the potential conflict between forest roughness and
the heroine's gentility is delicately acknowledged in a passage that demands
quotation. Ferrington and Annie are in a cabin besieged by the Indians. Noticing
a bush that moves suspiciously, Ferrington exclaims:

"It is a devilish Indian contrivance--"
"'Sh, George; do not speak thus," she interrupted, noticing the
expression,
in spite of the tumultuous feelings that reigned in her breast.
"I beg pardon. It is an Indian contrivance, and there are Shawnees hid
behind that same bush."

Fortunately, the friendly Huron Oonomoo is at hand to aid in the rescue of the
beleaguered pair, so that the hero is not fatally hampered by the restrictions
under which he must work.29

In Edward Willett's The Five Champions; or, The Backwoods Belle, the
problem of status is brought to the center of the stage. Henry Denton, who
"occupied a humble but useful position" as the son of a blacksmith in one of the
Cumberland settlements in early Kentucky "but possessed a laudable ambition to
rise above

98 THE WESTERN HERO

his present station," loves Lucy Simms, daughter of the
founder of the settlement.30 William Simms,
her aristocratic, wealthy, and arrogant cousin, a rival
suitor for Lucy's hand, denounces Henry's
"presumption." Lucy is captured by the Indians, and
despite the machinations of William Simms, Henry
rescues her with the aid of an old scout Ben Smiles who
has all the Leatherstocking stigmata. It is made plain
that this mating is a triumph of love over the humble
origins and poverty of the suitor. But the story
exemplifies an interesting principle which often
operates in the Beadle series -- and which indeed has
its precedents in Cooper: namely, that both the sons
and daughters of parents who speak a pronounced dialect
are themselves free of dialect if they are involved in
a love affair.31 The belief that no one is
suitable to conduct a sentimental courtship unless he
speaks a pure English is very strong; strong enough, in
fact, to upset the normal processes by which children
acquire the speech of the families and communities in
which
they grow up.

Joseph E. Badger's The Forest Princess; or,
The Kickapoo Captives. A Romance of the Illinois
presents an almost perfect pattern of the paired
hunters, of whom the elder, Pete Shafer, speaks a
strong dialect (here developed with genuine comic
feeling, as has been indicated earlier), while Uriah
Barham, the young hunter of presumably similar origins,
has no trace of dialect, and marries the heroine Myra
Mordaunt.32 Badger uses a similar formula in
The Border Renegade; or, The Lily of the Silver
Lake.33 Of three scouts operating in the
vicinity of Detroit in 1812, Andy Goochland and Sam
Hill have a strong dialect, while the young and
handsome Oscar Jewett, who wins the hand of Agnes
Letcher, speaks in conventionally stilted rhetoric. A
fourth hunter, represented as old and devoted to his
flintlock rifle, is a particularly faithful replica of
Leatherstocking. Eventually he turns out to be the
renegade George Girty in disguise. The persona tended
to persist with unusual rigidity when it was literally
a mask.

This rapid survey of examples chosen mainly from
the first decade of the Beadle novels makes it plain
that the development of the Western hero did not
proceed in a straight line. If a trend can be
discerned, it is toward creating a hero-type based on
the

Leatherstocking persona but made younger and
more genteel. This trend, however, is accompanied by
frequent returns to Cooper's standard practice of
providing an indisputably upper-class hero who comes
into the Wild West from the East. A decade of
experiment had not established a revised Western hero.
This state of confusion lasted well down into the
1870's. But in 1877 Edward L. Wheeler created a
character who despite the author's lack of imaginative
coherence was impressive enough to deserve a place with
Leatherstocking in the short roster of distinctive
Western heroes. Wheeler's character bore the name
Deadwood Dick, derived from the mining town which
sprang up with the gold rush to the Black Hills in
Dakota Territory, in the middle 1870's. Later Deadwood
Dick operated throughout the West, although a certain
fondness for mining camps reminds the reader of his
origins. His filiation with the young Wild Western
heroes produced by the doubling of the persona
of Leatherstocking might seem tenuous at first glance,
for he resembles these characters only in his youth,
his beauty, his mastery of the various manly arts of
defense and offense that are necessary to survival in
the mining camps, and his power of attracting women.
But the genealogy becomes clearer when we analyze
Deadwood Dick in connection with Duke Darrall, hero of
W. J. Hamilton's Old Avoirdupois; or, Steel Coat,
the Apache Terror, who preceded him upon Beadle's
stage by several years.

Duke, young and handsome, appears on the plains
in the company of several clearly Wild Western
characters, including the Kentuckian hunter Big Sam,
and is introduced by the author as "the beau
ideal of the hunter and scout."34 He seems
to have originated in the West -- at any rate, no
outside origin is mentioned. He is dressed in the
buckskin that had clad so many descendants of
Leatherstocking, but his garments are tailored with a
theatrical and implausible elegance. He is master of
the skills of a plainsman, and of others besides. When
a herd of stampeding mustangs is about to overrun the
party, Duke leaps from the ground to a standing
position on the backs of the closely packed horses and
with the assistance of Big Sam succeeds in turning the
herd.35 Yet Duke does not speak in dialect,
and is

100 THE WESTERN HERO

destined to marry the beautiful Wilna, a white girl
reared by the Indians. Indeed, it is now the heroine
who needs touching up to make her a suitable bride. She
is sent to a seminary in St. Louis for two years before
her marriage. At the end of that time she is "changed
as only education and the society of refined people can
change; but still the same frank, loving nature."36 Then she is ready to take the hand of Duke
Darrall, whose education has not been mentioned at
all.

This is a rather confused story and not much can
be built on it, but at least it offers us a hero
without hereditary upper-class rank, a hunter and
trapper by vocation, who functions as a skilled
craftsman of the wilderness and aids in the rescue of a
heroine from the Indians according to ancient
prescription. Yet he is at the same time a romantic
lover of unquestioned status. The same can be said of
Moccasin Mat, the less fully developed hero of Harry
St. George's Roaring Ralph Rockwood, The Reckless
Ranger. Mat is a former Texas Ranger with a horse
named Storm Cloud that answers his whistle.37
He speaks what is intended as correct English and is
united at the end with his long-lost sweetheart Hattie
Farley. The promotion of the Western hero to a part in
the love story is the significant stage in his
elevation. Averill's Kit Carson had been young and
handsome, and had spoken a conventional English, but he
had not been allowed to marry the heroine.

The most important traits of Deadwood Dick are
that he too is without the upper-class rank which
belongs exclusively to Easterners or Englishmen; that
he possesses to a high degree such characteristic
skills as riding and shooting; and that at the same
time he is eligible for romantic attachments. Indeed,
his life is cluttered with beautiful women pining for
his love. Deadwood Dick fully illustrates the principle
that Merle Curti found to be central in the dime novel.
Overcoming his enemies by his own efforts and courage,
he embodies the popular ideal of the self-made man.
Such a hero, presumably humble in his origins and
without formal education or inherited wealth,
"confirmed Americans in the traditional belief that
obstacles were to be overcome by the courageous,
virile, and determined stand of the individual as an
individual."38 Deadwood Dick, in fact, has
achieved fortune

101 THE WESTERN HERO

as well as fame; he has an income of five thousand
dollars a year from mining properties.39

But after these simple points of departure have
been established, the case of Deadwood Dick grows very
complex. His amours are hopelessly confused. He has
been married several times: one recorded wife sells
herself to the devil and becomes unfaithful to him,
another is killed, he is menaced by lovesick female
villains, he fruitlessly courts Calamity Jane, he is
subsequently the object of her hopeless devotion, and
in the end he marries her. Furthermore, he shows traces
not only of the Leatherstocking persona and of
the traditional genteel hero, but likewise of the
traditional villain: we learn that he has formerly been
a bandit and on at least one occasion he reverts to
banditry, in consequence of his wife's infidelity.
Although he began life as a stage driver, in the dime
novels considered here, he figures usually as a
detective. And there are disquieting hints that at
bottom he is a culture-hero of the Orpheus-Herakles
type, for after being hanged as a bandit, as he
remarks, "I was cut down and resuscitated by a friend,
and thus, while I hung and paid my debt to nature and
justice, I came back to life a free man whom no law in
the universe could molest for past offenses."40 This Proteus claiming to be both immaculate
and immortal has yet a further function: he exhibits a
concern with social problems that is, as far as my
knowledge extends, unique in the dime novels. In the
avatar of "Deadwood Dick, Jr.," a character
indistinguishable from Deadwood Dick, Sr., who figures
in many stories written by others using Wheeler's name
after his death in 1885, the hero leads a miners' union
and as superintendent of a mine raises wages. He is,
however, no socialist; he bitterly opposes an
organization called the Lion Legion which is trying to
seize the mine and operate it "on the commonweal
plan."41 And on a visit to Chicago soon after
the Haymarket Riots of 1886, Deadwood Dick, Jr.,
denounces the anarchists who are on trial because they
are an undesirable foreign element. He declares that
all the accused persons deserved to be hanged.42

It may be that Deadwood Dick's appeal to readers
of the Beadle novels depended on Wheeler's eclecticism,
the device of ascribing to the hero all the skills,
functions, graces, and successes

102 THE WESTERN HERO

that had ever fallen to the lot of any Western
character, plus other powers derived from folk heroes
of a forgotten past, and still other accomplishments
prophetic of the coming reign of the dime novel
detectives, Old Sleuth and Old Cap Collier. Deadwood
Dick is certainly not an integrated construction of the
imagination, and his fame reflects the kind of
sensationalism that increased so markedly in the later
1870's.43

The literary character of Buffalo Bill, most
famous of dime novel heroes, is in many respects
similar to that of Deadwood Dick. As the central figure
of a long series of tales (more than two hundred by
Prentiss Ingraham alone were still in print in the
1920's)1 Buffalo Bill performs exploits at
least as various and as prodigious as those of his
rival. Although he is not so deeply involved with women
as Deadwood Dick, he is young, handsome, well-tailored
in a spectacular Western mode, and adept at all manly
arts. In the 1890's he sometimes takes over Deadwood
Dick's role of detective. The Buffalo Bill of
literature, however, presents a different problem from
that of Deadwood Dick because he was supposed to have
as his original an actual man, the Honorable William F.
Cody, former member of the Nebraska Legislature, who
was constantly and flamboyantly in the public eye as
principal actor in his Wild West show. It is true that
a pretended original of Deadwood Dick, one Richard
Clark, the first stage driver into Deadwood, has been
mentioned by the scholiasts,2 but the man was
too inconspicuous to be compared for an instant with
the world-famous Cody, and Wheeler makes nothing of a
possible factual basis for his character. On the other
hand, the authors of the dime novels about Buffalo Bill
constantly stress their claim to be writing chapters in
the biography of a living celebrity.3

This fact gives a special character to the
Buffalo Bill of literature. From the time of Daniel
Boone, the popular imagination had constantly
transformed the facts of the westward movement in
accordance with the requirements of myth. Boone himself
lived to resent the popular image of him as an anarchic
fugitive from

103 THE WESTERN HERO

civilization, and successive biographers tried in vain
to correct what they considered a libelous distortion
of the hero's real character. Davy Crockett of
Tennessee, made the hero of a quite different cycle of
Southwestern humor, was likewise completely
transformed.4

The literary development of the Wild Western hero
in the second half of the nineteenth century made the
divergence between fact and fiction even greater. Where
Kit Carson had been represented as slaying his hundreds
of Indians, the dime novel hero slew his thousands,
with one hand tied behind him. But the persona
created by the writers of popular fiction was so
accurate an expression of the demands of the popular
imagination that it proved powerful enough to shape an
actual man in its own image. At the age of twenty-three
Cody was a young plainsman like hundreds of others who
had grown up beyond the Missouri. He had learned to
make a living in the ways dictated by his environment
-- bull-whacking, serving as "office boy on horseback"
for
Alexander Majors of the famous overland freighting
firm of Russel & Majors, driving stagecoaches, and
scouting with detachments of troops fighting the plains
Indians. His title of Buffalo Bill he had earned by
hunting buffalo to feed construction crews of the
Kansas Pacific Railroad. His actual life on the plains
before he became a figure of the theater is almost
completely obscured by the marvelous tales circulated
later by talented press agents, but he does not seem to
have been more skillful or daring than many of his
companions. It was an accident, plus a natural gift for
dramatizing himself, that made him the most highly
publicized figure in all the history of the Wild
West.

The accident was Cody's first meeting with Edward
Z. C. Judson, alias Ned Buntline, the patriarch of
blood-and-thunder romancers. Beginning as a contributor
to Lewis Gaylord Clark's Knickerbocker Magazine
in the late 1830's, Buntline had poured forth for
decades an endless stream of sea stories, articles
about field sports, tales of the Mexican War,
temperance tracts, and Know-Nothing attacks on
foreigners. By the time of his death in 1886 he had
written more than two hundred stories of the dime novel
type.5 In 1869 he signed a contract to write
exclusively for the New York Weekly, published
by Francis S. Street and

104 THE WESTERN HERO

Francis S. Smith; his fee was said to be $20,000 a
year.6 Although Buntline's specialty had been
sea stories, he evidently decided that it was time to
turn systematically to the plains for materials: the
nation at large was discovering the West. The editors
of the New York Weekly announced that he had been
traveling for two years in order to prepare himself to
write a new series of works.7

Buntline had heard of Major Frank North,
commander of three companies of Pawnee scouts who had
been enlisted in the regular army to fight the Sioux,
and late in 1869 sought out North at Fort McPherson,
Nebraska, with the intention of making him into a dime
novel hero. But North declined. "If you want a man to
fill that bill," he said, according to Cody's
biographer Richard J. Walsh, "he's over there under the
wagon." The man sleeping under the wagon was Cody, then
a relatively obscure scout attached to North's command.
Buntline talked with him, accompanied the Pawnees on a
scouting expedition, and bestrode Cody's horse Powder
Face.8 Then he went back to New York and
introduced an apotheosized Cody to the readers of the
New York Weekly in a serial entitled "Buffalo
Bill, the King of the Border Men," which the editors
characterized as "The
Greatest Romance of the Age!"9 The story was
subsequently brought out in book form, was reprinted
again and again, and was still being sold by Sears,
Roebuck at twenty-two cents in 1928.10

Although both Buntline and his publishers made
much of the supposed authenticity of the novel, it has
a very slight basis in biographical fact -- no more,
indeed, than might have been gathered in a somewhat
hasty interview. That Buntline was using oral data
exclusively is suggested by his phonetic spelling of
proper names -- "M'Kandlas" for "McCanles," "Bill
Hitchcock" for "Bill Hickok," and "Cantrell" for
"Quantrell." For our purposes it is important to notice
that the character of Buffalo Bill in this first
fictional appearance is in the main line of descent
from Cooper. The action consists of a series of
abductions of genteel females -- principally Bill's
twin sisters -- and rescues according to the
time-honored pattern. Wild Bill Hitchcock and Sim
Geary, worthy companions of the hero, speak in the
dialect of the Leatherstocking persona, and
Geary is represented as being appropriately aged.
Buffalo Bill, an example of the younger

105 THE WESTERN HERO

hunter created by doubling the persona, and not
speaking dialect, has Leatherstocking's skills in
trailing and creeping silently past sentries. It is
notable also that although he rides a horse, as
Leatherstocking did not, he carries a rifle.11
He even retains a trace of Leatherstocking's humility
-- a quaint archaism testifying to Buntline's
membership in a pre-Beadle generation. After Buffalo
Bill rescues the beautiful Louisa La Valliere of St.
Louis from a gang of drunken soldiers, he tells her
grateful and wealthy father they must never meet again:
"If I see her any more, I shall love her, and
love above my station would be madness and folly."12

Buntline's knowledge of the geography of the Far
West is hazy and there is almost no authentic Wild
Western coloring in the narrative. A great deal is made
of the Cody household in Kansas, which boasts a comic
Irish servant girl and four farm hands. Bill's mother
and his two sisters are excruciatingly genteel. The
latter half of the novel deals with guerrilla fighting
in Missouri during the Civil War and reaches a climax
in the Battle of Pea Ridge. Three straight heroes,
including Buffalo Bill but not including any of the
scouts who speak dialect, are wounded in the battle,
taken to a privately established hospital by the father
of Bill's fiance, and there married to their
respective ladies. The grain of truth in this
narrative consists of the fact that Cody had served as
a private in the Union Army and married Louis
Frederici of St. Louis in 1866.

Buntline and the editors of the publicized Buffalo Bill so enthusiastically
that he became something of a fad. James Gordon
Bennett, editor of the New York Herald, who had been on
one of General Sheridan's hunting trips for which Cody
served as guide and had written him up lavishly as "the
beau ideal of the plains," invited him to visit New
York, and Sheridan encouraged Cody to make the trip.
Buntline may well have planned the visit for purposes
of his own; it coincided with the opening of a play
Buffalo Bill, the King of Bordermen written by
Fred G. Maeder on the basis of Buntline's serial in the
New York Weekly.13 The scout was guest
of honor at dinners given by Bennett and by August
Belmont, although because of drink or na‹vet‚ he failed
to appear at the Belmont dinner. On the evening

106 THE WESTERN HERO

of February 20, 1872, Buntline took him to the Bowery
Theater to see the play. The climax, in the third act,
was a hand-to-hand fight between Buffalo Bill and Jake
McCanles in which they used knives reported to be three
feet long, and in the stage version Bill married the
Irish serving girl. The spotlight was turned on Cody
and he was introduced to the audience. Later the
manager of the theater offered him five hundred dollars
a week to enact himself in the play. But Cody was too
timid to accept the offer.14

Nevertheless, he had not heard the last of
Buntline, who continued writing to him at intervals
urging him to come back East and go on the stage. At
last Cody agreed to meet the novelist in Chicago,
bringing his friend Texas Jack Omohundro and twenty
Indians. When they arrived, December 12, 1872, they had
forgotten the Indians but Buntline hired supers and
with his sublime nonchalance set about writing a
script. In four hours he produced a piece entitled "The
Scouts of the Plains" that consisted mainly of shooting
Indians, and the play opened four days later. Buntline,
who had wisely arranged to be on the stage himself most
of the time, managed to improvise a rambling
conversation when his two scouts forgot all their
lines. Then there was a great deal of shooting and the
curtain came down.15 After three years of
association with Buntline, Cody and Omohundro organized
their own show, with John M. Burke as press agent and
business manager, and Buffalo Bill was on his way to
world-wide fame.16

To Burke, apparently, belongs the credit for
carrying through the major revision of the character of
Buffalo Bill as Buntline had originally conceived it.
Buntline had been content to exploit the rudimentary
values of Indian fighting and stock romance; even the
publicity writers for the New York Weekly had
not claimed that Buffalo Bill was anything more than
"the most daring scout, the best horseman, the best
informed guide, and the greatest hunter of the present
day."17 But Burke determined to enlarge the
frame within which his client was to be viewed by the
public. Buffalo Bill was to become an epic hero laden
with the enormous weight of universal history. He was
to be placed beside Boone and Fremont and Carson in the
roster of American heroes, and like them was to be
interpreted as a pioneer of civilization and a standard

107 THE WESTERN HERO

bearer of progress, although of course no showman would
forget the box-office appeal of black powder and trick
riding. This conception Burke dinned into Cody's ears
so constantly that the hero himself took up the
cliches, and in his old age used to say, "I
stood between savagery and civilization most all my
early days."18 The actual phrasing of the
slogan may have been due to Prentiss Ingraham, the dime
novelist, who had become virtually a staff writer for
Cody by 1878, and possibly earlier. Ingraham wrote that
Buffalo Bill was

one of America's strange heroes who has loved the trackless wilds,
rolling plains and mountain solitudes of our land, far more than the
bustle and turmoil, the busy life and joys of our cities, and who has
stood as a barrier between civilization and savagery, risking his own
life to save the lives of others.19

Ingraham composed the play that Cody used during the
season 1878-1879, and presumably also the
"autobiography" published in 1879.20 It will
be recalled that before his death in 1904 he produced
more than two hundred stories about Buffalo Bill, in
addition to his probable authorship of a large number
of dime novels signed by Cody.21
From his earliest youth Ingraham's Buffalo Bill
is associated with the spectral apparitions, the
chain-mail shirts that can stop bullets, and the
beautiful transvestite maidens seeking revenge that are
normal in the later dime novels. The novelist's
personal idiosyncrasy -- which Cody's own tastes
encouraged -- was his delight in splendor of attire.
The costume which he designed for Buffalo Bill's first
appearance as a Pony Express Rider in the tale Gold
Plume, the Boy Bandit was described as

a red velvet jacket, white corduroy pants, stuck
in handsome top boots, which were armed
with heavy gold spurs, and . . . upon his
head a gray sombrero, encircled by a gold cord
and looped up on the left side with a pin
representing a spur. He also wore
an embroidered silk shirt, a black cravat,
gauntlet gloves, and a sash
of red
silk, in
which were
stuck a
pair of
revolvers
and a
dirk-knife.
22

In his autobiography Cody -- or Ingraham -- describes a
costume which the hunter wore when he acted as guide
for Sheridan, Bennett,

108 THE WESTERN HERO

and other celebrities. He says that since "it was a
nobby and high-toned outfit," he determined to put on a
little style himself.

So I dressed in a new suit of light buckskin,
trimmed along the seams with fringes of the same
material; and I put on a crimson shirt hand-somely
ornamented on the bosom, while on my head I wore a
broad sombrero. Then mounting a snowy white horse
-- a gallant stepper -- I rode down from the fort
to the camp, rifle in hand. I felt first-rate that
morning, and looked well.23

Several years later, in the summer of 1876, when Cody
fought his much publicized duel with Yellow Hand and
took "the first scalp for Custer" under the eyes of
newspaper correspondents, he wore a costume that must
have been taken from the wardrobe of his theatrical
company. It consisted of a Mexican suit of black
velvet, slashed with scarlet and trimmed with silver
buttons and lace.24 These costumes, fictional
and actual, illustrate the blending of Cody with his
theatrical role to the point where no one -- least of
all the man himself -- could say where the actual left
off and where dime novel fiction began.

As if to exhaust all the possible relationships
between fact and imagination, Cody's press-agents
caused many stories to be issued under his own name.
Although he himself does not figure in the plots of
these stories, they closely resemble those in which he
does. Deadly-Eye, issued with The Prairie
Rover in 1877 in the short-lived Beadle & Adams
20 Cent Novel series, relates the exploits of the
Unknown Scout, alias Deadly-Eye, alias Alfred Carleton,
young, handsome, and of such sartorial splendor that
the story must be by Ingraham.25 Like the young Buffalo
Bill in Buntline's first story, the Unknown Scout is
motivated by a thirst for vengeance upon the slayer of
his parents. Since he has been educated in the East and
speaks the straight rhetoric of the genteel hero, the
Unknown Scout represents the Seth Jones use of the
persona as a disguise and can marry the heroine Sibyl
Conrad without impediments.26 Gold Spurs, hero of Gold
Bullet Sport; or, The Knight of the Overland, is even
more elegant than the Unknown Scout; he has a velvet
jacket and gold-plated spurs and weapons that again
strongly suggest Ingraham's authorship. He is assisted
by a benign hunter and trapper named Buckskin Ben who
speaks in dialect and is viewed with the patronizing
approval traditionally

109 THE WESTERN HERO

reserved for replicas of Leatherstocking.27
Since the Gold Bullet Sport wears many
disguises in the course of his pursuit of the villain,
and is represented as having served a prison term after
a false conviction of bank robbery, he has some of the
criminal flavor that clings to Deadwood Dick.28 In view
of these similarities one is not surprised to find the
Buffalo Bill of later Ingraham stories appearing as a
detective and as a stage driver.29 And one
recalls that the Deadwood Coach was always a part of
Buffalo Bill's Wild West show.
The Wild Western hero as cowboy, who in the
twentieth century has become the dominant type, first
appeared in the wake of Buffalo Bill in the late
1880's. American readers of the national magazines had
long been familiar with Mexican rancheros and
vaqueros in California and Texas, but the
American hired man on horseback did not become a
celebrated figure until the range industry spread
northward from Texas over the Great Plains in the early
1870's. In this decade the term "herder" was as likely
to be used as the classic name of "cowboy," and it
usually called up the image of a semibarbarous laborer
who lived a dull, monotonous life of hard fare and poor
shelter.30 Laura Winthrop Johnson, writing for
Lippincott's in 1875, saw no glamor in the "rough men
with shaggy hair and wild, staring eyes, in butternut
trousers stuffed into great rough boots" whom she
described at a round-up in Wyoming.31
Toward the end of the decade, however, Henry
King, a writer for Scribner's, was able to
detect a touch of the picturesque in the ranch life of
western Kansas. Although he was depressed by the bleak
solitude of the plains, he enjoyed the exotic note of
color introduced by the costumes of the herdsmen, who
affected "old Castilian sombreros, and open-legged
trowsers with rows of buttons, and jackets gaudy with
many-colored braid and Indian beads, and now and then a
blood-red scarf like a matador's."32 King also
suggested that the cowboy had some virtues despite his
violence: he was generous, brave, and scrupulously
honest, with "a strange, paradoxical code of personal
honor, in vindication of which he will obtrude his life
as though it were but a toy."33 As late as
1881, however, the pejorative connotations of the term
"cowboy" were still uppermost. President Chester A.
Arthur's First